Information Assurance

5.1. Introduction and Background

There is no single agreed-upon definition for system survivability. Instead, one may use as a starting point the vague notion that a system has to be able to tolerate diverse faults. This includes those faults typically considered in the area of fault-tolerant system design, such as faults resulting from component failure as a consequence of aging, fatigue or breakdown of materials. These faults may exhibit very predictable behavior and frequency. However, in the last decade there has been much attention on humanly-induced malicious faults (e.g., hacking, denial of service, virus, Trojan horses, spoofing). These kind of faults may be totally unpredictable. Before elaborating on the predictability of faults, or ...